Family lawyers share and analyze news about family law. Founder and editor: John Crouch of Crouch & Crouch, http://www.crouchfamilylaw.com/

The Virginia Supreme Court and the Judicial Council are considering a new rule to deal with limited-scope representation, especially assistance to people who are already in litigation. My comments on it are below. The proposal, and where you can send comments by March 1, 2018, are at:

This is a very important reform. Full-scale representation in family law litigation is often unaffordable even by people who would be considered upper middle class. And it takes both divorcing spouses to prevent any particular divorce from becoming unaffordable, long-running litigation.

The proposed rule has many cautionary requirements for the attorney, or the attorney’s name and contact information, to be present in court, and on documents, even for issues where the lawyer is not involved. Please bear in mind that each of these requirements comes at a cost, not only of the attorney’s time, attention, and availability for other cases, but also by sowing predictable confusion among clients and especially their opposing parties, who aren’t involved in the limited-scope agreement. When lawyers’ names are on papers or a lawyer is present, lay people are going to assume that the lawyer is a prime mover in whatever is going on. Lay people, and even the lawyers themselves, will often feel that the lawyer has some responsibility to intervene or advise about whatever comes to the lawyer’s attention. Lawyer’s instinct to be helpful will inevitably cause “mission creep” in many cases.

Clients and other members of the public may also feel that the lawyer is hanging around like a vulture waiting to insert herself into the proceedings and expand her involvement so that it is no longer limited. Or interfering, intruding and violating the client’s desire to limit the scope of the lawyer’s work, by writing to the client with repeated notifications of well-known facts about hearing dates, etc., whenever the lawyer is cced on something the other side sends out. Many clients already respond this way to communications that court rules and ethics rules require us to send.

Line comments

9-10

I agree that a lawyer should not be present but generally uninvolved, only popping up now and then with objections. That would be chaotic and unfair.

But I can also see the value in having an attorney handle only a particular motion in limine or motion to suppress. It seems fairly clear that the intent is to allow that, but it would help to make that explicit.

11-13

" A notice of limited scope representation is not required for … (ii) services performed by an attorney before any litigation is pending”

Does that dispensation also apply to the requirements to “indicate” or “identify" in (1) (F), Alternative versions 2 through 5?

I believe it should apply. Either way, that question should be answered explicitly.

26 et seq. — Alternative versions of (F)

In all versions, the term “papers for submission to a court” is intended to be clear, but what about marital separation agreements? They are not court filings. They are binding contracts when the parties sign them, regardless of whether they are submitted to a court. But whenever one gets signed by both spouses, perhaps 95% of the time there is going to be divorce, and the agreement i8s going to be submitted to the court as part of the divorce process.

I think limited-scope assistance is crucial, so I oppose Alternative # 5, which essentially bans limited-scope, and Alternative # 4, which creates a presumption against it; imposes a needless requirement to essentially file a notice of appearance, and then to file a notice of disappearance.

86

“Papers” sounds vague. I think you mean litigation documents such as pleadings or discovery requests, but we need a more precise, comprehensive, understandable, and distinctive term for that.

If it’s intended to mean everything, including settlement correspondence, that’s reasonable, too, but that too would need to be clearer. Because the word “papers”, to a lot of people, vaguely indicates papers that are somehow official, binding, and/or threatening.

88

The requirement should be to notify the “sender”, not “the adversaries”. They might not be the same people.

notify the adversaries in writing of that fact

should be changed to

notify the adversaries, in writing, of that fact

or

notify the adversaries of that in writing

But really, “that” or “that fact” might not make clear to everyone which of the facts mentioned earlier in the sentence it refers to, so it would be better to say,

“the attorney must notify the sender that the documents received deal wholly or partly with matters outside the scope of the limited representation,"

107-108

"(D) Contacts by adversaries or co-parties on matters within the limited scope of 108 representation shall be with counsel …"

What about family law cases, where many couples legitimately continue some kinds of negotiation between themselves, even when they both have counsel who are negotiating at the same time?

110-111

“copy served upon the attorney making a limited scope appearance” —

Would serving the attorney require that attorney to respond and notify as required in (3)(C)? If that happens once, it makes sense or is at least harmless. But in litigation where filings go back and forth almost every week, it’s going to drag the limited-scope attorney into a lot of busy work, and confuse litigants — the client and/or the opposing party — about the attorney’s role.

115-116

(A) — attendance at all court proceedings, outside the scope, should not be required if the rule is truly allowing limited representation. I would expect attorneys to charge for this time, and it would be a major burden on the clients and the attorneys.

John Crouch

VSB Council Member for 17th Circuit

Fellow, International Academy of Family Lawyers (Formerly IAML)and International Academy of Collaborative Professionals

(And husband-beater.) I'm a divorce lawyer, so I should know. Masked Berkeley rioter Neil Lawrence makes the all-too-familiar argument that violence is OK when people don't shut up and obey even after you ask nicely:

"But when you consider everything that activists already tried — when mass call-ins, faculty and student objections, letter-writing campaigns, numerous op-eds (including mine), union grievances and peaceful demonstrations don’t work, when the nonviolent tactics have been exhausted — what is left? Of all the objections and cancellation requests presented to the administration, local government and local police, the only one that was listened to was the sound of shattering glass."

<<According to the Tribune, Sacks “has long had a reputation for delivering strongly worded rebukes from the bench.” He was reassigned for four months to domestic relations court in 2004 for what the Tribune describes as his “profanity-punctuated lecture” during a sentencing hearing.>>

"... We're now entering into a compliance culture, where if you do something wrong, the sanctions are always draconian. So you (A) have to have somebody to fix it so you don't get punished. And (B) you have to have all your ducks in order so that if something goes wrong you have all sorts of defenses ... So the compliance culture essentially requires industry concentration ... If you double the size of a firm, you don't double the size of your compliance costs. And so one of the things that Obamacare has done is that it has led to a wave of hospital and industry mergers in an effort to minimize compliance costs thereby creating higher levels of market concentration, which leads to monopoly power."

The proposed change only requires lawyers to fill in a number in a "How many hours" blank once a year when renewing their membership and paying their dues to the mandatory Virginia State Bar, which licenses and regulates lawyers. There's a lot more that advocates for the poor's legal needs might want to know to make the information more useful -- what kinds of law do you practice? Which of the many kinds of work listed in the Definitions section do you do? Do you do the pro bono through other institutions or just through your law firm? What needs do you think are out there? Any other ways you could work to meet them? What gets in the way of doing that?

So the Bar only asks lawyers this one short, innocent question, about your free-will offering of humanitarian good works, where the only wrong answer is no answer. (Or an answer that's not a number of hours.) But it makes lawyers awfully apprehensive when it shows up asking that little question but loaded for bear, bristling with hooks, nets, expulsion devices, license-grabbers, long lists and cross-references. Not in a survey like the ones the Supreme Court and Bar already send out, but as part of membership renewal, in a list of questions that gravely affect one's permission to practice law: have you been conflicted of a felony, been disciplined by another state's bar, do you have liability insurance ... ? If lawyers wonder exactly what hours they should include in the number, they need to look up the lists of definitions and alternative means of compliance (which the proposed change will lengthen) in Professional Responsibility Rule 6.1 and, especially in its Commentary. To find out the rules and penalties for not reporting or late reporting, they must look at Bar Organization Rule "19. Procedure for the Administrative Suspension of a Member." And it does it, not in a survey like the ones the Supreme Court already sends out, but as part of membership renewal and in a list of questions that gravely affect one's permission to practice law: have you been conflicted of a felony, been disciplined by another state's bar, do you have liability insurance ... ?

In the Clinton impeachment we decided that perjury isn't an impeachable offense, at least when it's basically about a president's private life and not the essential parts of his job, treason, murder, rape, subverting democratic elections, corruption ... .

But what about plain old criminal prosecutions? if presidents and candidates don't get prosecuted for obvious perjury either, then that tells everyone else to disregard that lying when testifying it's illegal and dangerous. And it gives lawyers and judges another reason not to believe what anyone says. Testifying to a court -- whether on the witness stand, in a deposition, or a written, notarized affidavit -- is under oath and "under penalty of perjury."

Newsweekhas published clear proof that Donald Trump either: (a) lied in a deposition in a case against an ex-employee, about a failed attempt to bribe Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, or (b) lied about it to Bush's face in the second debate. Or both. (Even if bribe is the wrong word, that doesn't affect the specific question that the lie and contradiction were about: Whether Trump was trying to get Bush to reverse his opposition to casino gambling when he hired the Defendant to get Florida to allow him to build a casino and hosted a fundraising event for Bush.)

The ABA reports that mandatory pro bono reporting policies, in states that had recently enacted them, were followed by sharp decreases in four states, and a slight increase in one state, from 2009 to 2013. In the states that had already had the policies for several years, one state saw a slight increase and the other showed no change. Here's a summary. Much more info on policies and statistics is at the ABA's page, Pro Bono Reporting: State Reporting Policies.

State

Year imposed

2009 Participation

2013 Participation

Florida

1993

51%

51%

Hawaii

2007

50%

41%

Illinois

2007

32%

34%

Maryland

2002

54%

57%

Mississippi

2007

53%

40% *

Nevada

2007

43%

33%

New Mexico

2008

67%

57%

* Mississippi stopped reporting percentages in 2012, but I computed the number by looking at the numbers on hours worked and hours per lawyer, and comparing with those numbers from the last year a percentage was reported.

(2009's total hours divided by hours per lawyer =8745=44%, so total lawyers = 198752012-13 total hours divided by hours per lawyer =8031, which is 40.4% of 19875.)